Japanese Art and Its Korean Secret

By HOLLAND COTTER

A seated Buddha from the
site of the Kunsu-ri Temple in Paekche, Korea.

Han Seok-Hong

A seated Vairocana from the
Unified Silla dynasty, Korea.

Nara National Museum

A standing "jewel holding"
bodhisattva from Japan's Asuka period.

Nara National Museum

A Sakkyamuni Buddha with
attendant bodhisattva.

INCE the 1970's,
art history has been paying at least as much attention to what makes
art connective as to what makes it individually distinctive. The basic
assumption is that all art is, to a greater or lesser degree, shaped
by other art. There's no such thing as a stand-alone aesthetic. No art
is an island unto itself.

This cosmopolitan model applies even to "island art," as is suggested
by two exhibitions in New York this spring that focus on Japan. Both
shows are based on concepts of cultural dispersion, and both in different
ways break with established political and institutional views of their
subject.

"Transmitting the Forms of Divinity: Early Buddhist Art From Korea
and Japan," at the Japan Society from Thursday through June 22, goes
against the grain of history to present an integrated picture of two
East Asian countries that were bitter enemies throughout much of the
20th century. "Great Waves: Chinese Themes in the Arts of Korea and
Japan," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Aug. 17, tackles similar
issues of influence in an interdepartmental collaboration that verges
on being revolutionary for a museum that presents art in terms of discrete
territorial units.

The Japan Society exhibition, which promises to be one of the great
Asian shows of the season, has personal associations for me. Nearly
20 years ago, the same institution presented a fabulous little survey
titled "The Great Age of Japanese Buddhist Sculpture: A.D. 600-1300,"
which included three of the same precious gilt bronze images that will
be in the new show.

One was an eighth-century figure of the smiling infant Buddha, his
arm raised high in a "hey, there" salute. Another was a seventh-century
jewel-holding bodhisattva, regally robed and crowned, looking like an
inverted, bell-shaped flower. The third was a 12-inch-high image thought
to be of the Buddha of the Future, Maitreya, called Miroku in Japan,
who is shown seated, relaxed, eyes closed, one finger held to his cheek,
like a commuter catching a catnap.

All three pieces were familiar textbook classics, but I had never
seen them "live." After one look at the Maitreya I knew I had to go
to the country he was from. A month later, I flew to Japan and spent
weeks visiting museums and temples, in cities and in the countryside,
from the grand religious centers like Mount Koya to a pilgrimage route
of 88 temples, some no bigger than bus shelters, that circle the island
of Shikoku.

Of the dozens of images I encountered, the most moving was also the
most famous: the meditating Miroku at the Koryuji temple in Kyoto. Carved
from red pine, it is, in effect, a larger version of the little bronze
figure at the Japan Society. It is also a symbol of Japan itself and
an embodiment of qualities often used to define Japanese-ness in art:
formal simplicity and emotional serenity. To see it was to have an instant
Japanese experience. I had mine.

As it turns out, though, the Koryuji sculpture isn't Japanese at all.
Based on Korean prototypes, it was almost certainly carved in Korea
and sent to Japan, along with many other Buddhist artifacts. In addition,
some scholars think that the little statue of Maitreya that sent me
flying across the world may be Korean too.The catalog for "Transmitting
the Forms of Divinity" is full of such news, and it is not neutral information.
It means reassigning origin and authorship of objects that are, in some
cases, emblems of cultural pride and national self-definition, a sensitive
matter given the contentious modern history of Korea and Japan.

The two countries, separated by only a narrow stretch of water, have
been hostile since Japan occupied the Korean peninsula in the late 19th
century, then colonized it from 1910 to 1945, treating Koreans as an
inferior, subject people, an attitude more or less adopted in the West
with the Korean War.

When the occupation ended, Korea severed official connections with
Japan and banned all things Japanese. It was only in the 1990's that
a thaw began, which culminated in the two countries' co-sponsoring the
2002 World Cup and in Emperor Akihito's acknowledging the Korean lineage
of the Japanese imperial family. By then, Korean and Japanese art institutions
had already begun to share history-revising research. "Transmitting
the Forms of Divinity" is a collaboration between the Nara National
Museum in Japan and the Gyeongju National Museum in Korea, under auspices
of the Japan Society and the Korea Society, both in New York City, the
exhibition's only stop.

The material — some 60 sculptures, along with a handful of sutra
scrolls and architectural ornaments — is extraordinary in its
rarity and beauty. The very fact that two governments have permitted
some of their countries' earliest treasures to travel abroad, be exhibited
together and, inevitably, be compared is persuasive evidence of rapprochement.
And the selection itself required diplomatic tact.

Although Japan has a fair number of impressively large early Buddhist
sculptures, very few survive in Korea. Rather than risk an impression
of aesthetic imbalance, the show's curators — Washizuka Hiromitsu,
director of the Nara National Museum, and Park Youngbok, director of
the Gyeongju National Museum — factored matters of object size
into their final cut by highlighting small early Japanese pieces and
adding some large, later Korean sculptures.

And what art-historical ground does the exhibition actually break?
The fact that Buddhist art was introduced to Japan by Korea is not new,
but much of the wealth of clarifying detail is. The show not only establishes
various Chinese sources for Buddhist images in Korea, but also unravels
the art's complicated development on the Korean peninsula itself, where
it was received at different times by three competing kingdoms: Koguryo,
Paekche and Silla.

Each developed variant forms and styles, which were exported to Japan,
where they underwent further transformations. The obvious upshot of
the show's detective work is to establish that certain classic "Japanese"
pieces are actually "Korean." More important, though, Korea's developmental
role in Buddhist art, only glancingly referred to in standard accounts,
is revealed to have been crucial, and Japan's debt to its once vassal-neighbor
profound.

The status awarded Korea at the Japan Society is not reflected in
the Met's "Great Waves: Chinese Themes in the Arts of Korea and Japan,"
which is drawn largely from the museum's collection and takes a broad,
traditionally Sinocentric approach to the issue of East Asian cultural
flow. At the same time, the very fact that the show is installed in
both the Chinese and Japanese galleries is noteworthy. Mixing and matching
on this scale is extremely unusual for the Met, and the show has an
exhilaratingly radical feeling, the way it might if Picassos were sprinkled
through the museum's African collection.

The work in the Chinese galleries, organized by Maxwell K. Hearn, a
curator in the Asian art department, is arranged by a set of Chinese
pictorial themes — water imagery, landscapes, floral motifs —
adopted by Japanese and Korean artists. Some cross-cultural relationships
are approximate, as in the pairing of a 14th-century Chinese hand scroll
by Zhang Yucai, of dragons cavorting in rain clouds, and a bravura two-panel
Japanese screen titled "Rough Waves" by Ogata Korin (1658-1716).

Other comparisons are finely tuned to point up a dynamic of emulation
and interpretation in works made in different cultures, sometimes centuries
apart. The other half of the show, installed in the Japanese galleries,
is less coherently conceived. And with only a single Korean piece included
among nearly 50 Japanese and Chinese works, it reinforces the impression
of Korea's cultural invisibility that the Japan Society show takes pains
to dispel.

Still, provocative ideas are at play in the Met's resourceful reinstallation
of its collection, just as they will be, in more focused and innovative
form, at the Japan Society. After years of exhibitions proclaiming the
"triumph" of this culture or that, the reality of interdependence is
being acknowledged even in conventional quarters. Both art and the world
are too complex and too fragile to be viewed any other way.